AUSTIN - The halls of the Austin Convention Center became a reunion place of sorts as people who knew each other only through the Internet ether came face to face for the first time: "Oh my God, you're one of my Flickr contacts," a man said as he hugged a woman.

SXSW Interactive, going on through Tuesday, is Texas' biggest gathering of geeks. It's a think fest of sorts, where really smart people talk about a medium whose breadth and impact are still in infancy. They speak their own language, talking about Web 2.0, about how the Web has evolved since the dot-com bust in 2001.

Jason Fried of 37 Signals, which produces corporate messaging systems and backpackit.com, put out a hippie notion of the Internet in his opening remarks: The less money, the less time and the less planning you do, the better things will be. "We're making it up as we go along," he said. "Don't be afraid to fail."

In a way, he set the perfect tone for a conference that very rarely deals with tangibles, for a gathering in which 3,500 or so attendees come to chat about abstractions.

But beyond all the XML and CSS and DOM Scripting talk, the technology boils down to a basic human desire to socialize.

But what's interesting, argues Liz Lawley, a researcher for Microsoft, is that the real world and the Internet world are crashing into each other.

"Like most of you," she said, "I was seduced by WarCraft." She started playing every day, at first globally against people in Japan or Ohio or the U.K. Then, she got to playing with her kids and co-workers.

And Lawley noticed something curious: In real life, her kids hardly speak to her. But in the game, when mother and children are represented by Avatars of equal footing, they did. Not only that, but one day she got a phone call from a co-worker warning her that her kid was acting impolitely in the game.

"Now, I have to supervise my children's looting behavior in an interactive setting," she said.

That's funny, but like blogs are said to have democratized media, this is a major cultural shift. "These environments," Lawley said, "are becoming more pervasive and they are shifting what it means to be intimate in an online environment."

The questions this brings up — Does it change our behavior toward one another? Do social norms become obsolete? Do we create a more open world? — can't be answered yet.

Each night after the panel discussions are over, the Interactive attendees leave behind the business and head to Austin's bars — not unlike the participants of the better known South by Southwest film and music conferences.

At the Copa Bar on Congress, a bunch of geeks lay down rhythm tracks and melody on the go with plug-ins they've created for programs like Pro Tools. Billed as Austin's first Laptop Battle, the competition was sponsored by the Austin Museum of Digital Art.

Some of the resulting music sounded like Pac-Man on methamphetamine or typical trance, but even if the participants scrambled with cables and laptops instead of drums and guitars, the intent was visceral.

The winners of each battle weren't the ones with the shiniest plug-in. Instead, they were the ones who made an emotional, social connection with the crowd.